TBPN Live - Founders Guide to VC Holiday Parties, Dawgs of the Week, Zuck's Gold Chain, Trillion Dollar Potential

Episode Date: December 14, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy, get off the phone, please. Sorry, Senator. I'm going to have to call you back. Okay. Great night last night. Took a massive group of bros and actually two women as well to the movies. We went and saw Interstellar, 10-year anniversary, 70mm IMAX, Universal CityWalk. Been there. Fantastic event.

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Actually, the last time I saw interstellar was at 70 millimeter imax maybe even the same theater uh great when it first released yeah yeah i think it's been 10 years uh fantastic movie very techno optimist very sci-fi lots of fun the iconic scene of the guy like through the glass right is that the movie that i'm thinking of yeah no don't go don't go like like make me stay that, make me stay, that whole thing. And there's, yeah, that great docking scene where they're like, it's impossible.

He's like, no, it's necessary. Yeah. It makes you think of, you know, raising the impossible round with, you know, one month of runway left. Yeah. It's impossible. It can always be done.

But it's necessary. Yeah. Great movie. A lot of people say, John, how do you get 30 people in a single movie? Yeah, I'll break it down. How do you pull that off? I highly recommend this to everyone, no matter what city you're in.

If you have a movie theater, what you do, go to Fandango, pick a movie. Doesn't matter if it's bad. It just has to be a good bro movie. We did a Jason Statham movie, The Beekeeper, once. It was a disaster, but it was amazing.

Did you ever do Minions? no uh we just pick something fun something easy accessible don't go art house don't go depressing just something action movie something silly a classic something that's in theaters you've seen before get a whole row get 20 tickets uh buy the tickets and then just text literally just go down your text list. Everyone that you've texted in the last month who's in your city, hey, go into this movie. You want to come? Yep. And then whoever gets back to you, some people just won't even respond.

Other people, oh, I'm busy. And then a lot of people bail the last second. Some people will jump on the last second. Yep. But you can refund the tickets up until like 15 minutes before. And so there's no financial risk. Yeah. But you've de-risked the-

The social capital that you generate from hosting your absolute boys and girls. It's fantastic. That movie is priceless. Yeah, and it just defeats the activation energy of like, hey, should we do something? Well, who else is in? It's like the first text is like,

I'm going to see Interstellar in 70 millimeter with 20 people. Do you want to come? And then people are just like, sure. Yeah, it's so much easier. So highly recommend it. Holiday season, there'll be friends in town, people traveling, holidays, and it's a great experience.

So just go make it happen. We've done it a few times. Try and run it back as often as possible. Yeah, cinema is meant to be enjoyed as a collective in many ways. Cinema has now become so much like I'm going there with my little tiny group, you know, one or maybe a couple people. You just sit there in silence. But there's an amazing energy of filling a row with your absolute boys

and just locking in. Yeah, the emotional moments are more emotional. The funny moments are funnier. Everything's better with a big group. If you get scared, you can grab on to your bro. Bulky size. Your mass monster who you brought with you yeah david yeah yeah definitely bring a guy who can bench 400 pounds to keep you safe during the scary parts yeah that's essential well it is the holiday seasons it's christmas time and we are bringing you today something really special. We are breaking down the Founder's Guide to VC Christmas Parties.

And I have a cheat sheet here that, oh, this is a prized possession. You put a lot of work into this. There's a lot of alpha here. And basically, more than a decade of actually attending these and trying to extract the most amount of value. Exactly. Just because it's the holiday season, just because you're getting into the spirit of giving and just socializing and doesn't mean you shouldn't be trying to extract value out of the event. Exactly. There's always an opportunity cost.

You could be working. If you're going to the Christmas party, you got to get your money's worth. And so I have six steps here. Jordy has a bunch of different ideas. We'll break it all down for you. Here's how to get the most out of attending a VC Christmas party. Step one, you got to get your friends on the list. This is tough because the guest list can be very tight. You got to make your friends sound interesting. You got to craft

compelling backstories for them. I have some examples. You go to whoever's hosting, say, hey, I got a buddy. He's in stealth mode on a revolutionary startup. He's building a bear domestication platform. He's an expert a bear domestication platform he's an expert in bear domestication uh you can just be like hey you've seen that movie inception yeah he's doing that he's doing dream tech biotech founder yep in bear domestication yeah or doing or doing dream tech sleep tech uh you know johnson rejuvenation these are the guys that get invited any anyone else who's just building b2b sass they're going to show up to the partner meeting straight away but they're not getting the Christmas invite.

The Christmas invite is for the crazy folks. But you've got to get them up to speed. You've got to tell them, hey, I pitched you as the inception guy. I need you to pull an all-nighter. Get up to speed on this. You can't just walk in there because you're going to be quizzed. Get on perplexity and just start researching. Yeah, how would we make inception happen in real life?

You might need to be, if you're the bear domestication guy, you've got to know all the different breeds, how we're getting them smaller how how long is this going to take what's your timeline you want to have some marks on your face exactly it's a process they're not fully domesticated yet like go down get violently slashed by something yeah and you know really it's like a method it's like john feo's you know method entrepreneurship you got to get into character and if somebody that's in a biotech founder and bear domestication certainly getting clipped with a claw here or there yeah otherwise you're just working with previously domesticated bears yeah yeah so you got you got to work the list work around whoever's organizing the assistance the

the wild card folks who might be in the organization might have access to the event bread or the paperless post or whatever they're using. Get the names on the list. You got to understand the security is going to be tight. This isn't a college party. You can't pass back an ID. That's not going to play. You got to be on the list.

And so once you get your boys in, you want to be arriving early. You got to respect the opportunity cost. Time here is time away from building your empire. You got to maximize the night so you show up probably want to be bringing a gun and the reason is because it puts them in an awkward position it's like either they respect the second amendment let you in yeah or and trust you and trust you and then you're and then you're carrying the whole time. Yeah.

Or they make you take it off and check it at the door. And then you can be like, oh, so I guess you're un-American. And then you have the high ground. Yeah, yeah. And if they invest in American dynamism, then you have a little bit of blackmail on them to be like, you could go. Oh, yeah.

They didn't even allow guns at their Christmas party. Yeah, yeah. They didn't allow me to carry at the Christmas party. How American are you? Exactly. Yeah. And this goes back. Like I, uh, a lot of people in LA carry and, uh, a lot of people, all of the country carry, but surprisingly here in LA and I have no issues being around people that carry as long as I really fully trust them. And if that's the case and great, I'm actually

feel safer knowing that they're, they're, they're strapped. Right. And so it's a good way to determine, does your, does your GP, does VC actually trust you? And if they've invested in your company already, then great. If they haven't yet, it's a sign that they are probably more likely to invest because if they trust you with their life, they'll trust you with their capital. Exactly. Exactly. So once you get in, you got to scout the best drinks. You got to skip the tray past wine and champagne. That's the house wine. You got to head straight for the wine cellar, usually in the basement. Scout out the sommelier. You got to ask for the best pour. You're looking for screaming eagle. Here's what you do. You don't just drink it one glass at a time. You say,

hey, I got a bunch of friends upstairs. Can I get four glasses? Take one, chug it right there in front of them. Let them know established dominance, established dominance. Then as you're walking up the stairs, that's glass two. Then you head upstairs. You act like, Oh, I'm looking for my buddy, but I'm just going to take a sip. You're down to two glasses. Now take the third glass. And then as you're milling about Scott in the scene, four glasses, then you're a full bottle of screaming eagle in. Exactly exactly do it a little more leisurely at least yeah exactly so now you're already up on the deck to be clear the sommelier knows you've had at least one glass yeah but everyone else just thinks you're on your first exactly they didn't see the other three plausible deniability yeah so now now like no matter what

happens you've you've hurtled your your opportunity cost because you've consumed an entire bottle of screaming eagle yep now it's time to get some food in you. So you got to head to the buffet. Usually there's prime rib or another high value protein, and you're going to want to take down as much as possible, but this is where it gets creative. Bring a couple of Ziploc bags, take a couple of prime ribs home to your team. If you're a bootstrap startup, you can feed your entire team for a week off of what you can take. Yeah. And I would recommend like take, you know, don't just bring a couple of Ziploc bags, bring 30 or 40 and actually stash them around the property so that you can, you could, you could come back after the party's ended. The host will probably

be fairly incapacitated, right? They've had a bunch of drinks throughout the night. They're sleeping, leave the party, but then actually come back like an hour later and just collect all the, all the prime rib and then get out of there again. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. So step four, you got to navigate the social scene. You got to handle the cool kids because if you're a founder, you're not going to be the hottest kid there. You're not gonna be the coolest guy. There's always gonna be someone who's flexing a little bit harder. Um, there be a lot of drugs going around potentially you got to skip the mushroom bar for sure no psychedelics uh there might be tattoos if that's the case let everyone know get a giant chess piece bald eagle eating a panda bear let people know yeah you're an american a real patriot

real patriot everyone will be getting like small tattoos because it's, you know, it's, it's time limited. You want to be in there for two hours. Yeah. And so much, so much of company building is pure pain tolerance, right? Yes. You've got to chew glass for a decade to get that generational outcome. Yep. And so if you can sit there at the holiday party, getting a chest piece for two hours,

that's a way to display that level of pain tolerance and and don't flinch don't cry just just take it on the chest yeah and that's an easy way to get your next round done because that other vcs are going to see this guy just got a pound of ink in his flesh didn't even win of course i can trust him with my money right because this is about this isn't really about if you're if you're invited to the holiday party, you either have a pending term sheet or already in the portfolio. And so this is really about getting in front

of the other capital allocators at the event and getting their attention so that they can get your next round done. Yeah, and so you want to bring your pitch deck. You want to print it out. Use a high quality 80 pound paper. Don't go cheap. No 20 pound, no 30 pound. Smart. Full color. You want to bind it and you want to leave it everywhere uh use a high quality 80 pound paper don't go cheap no no 20 pound no 30

pound smart full color you want to bind it and you want to leave it everywhere drop it strategically in the bathroom the home office behind books where get it in the gym wherever you think the put it in the prime rib you know the the catering and they have the flip it open a little pitch deck in there easy next person to find it a vc is not going to be able to resist looking at the pitch deck no matter how pop in the party is yep so then you would you use airdrop in a situation like this where you just start airdropping to anybody like in the in the vicinity i like i like the way you're thinking yeah i like the way you're thinking because if you're out of the physical copies start blasting airdrops yep exactly yeah so then you're going to want to mill about now you have your tattoo you got your steak you got your screaming So then you're going to want to mill about. Now you have your tattoo,

you got your steak, you got your screaming Eagle. Uh, you're going to head upstairs and there's probably going to be some cool kids hanging out in some private room, maybe doing a little bit of cocaine. You want to stay away from that, but you don't want to get mugged by the cool kids. So here's what you do. You walk in, you see them. Hey, and they're going to be like, Hey, come do the Coke. You don't want to, you want to stick to the basics caffeine nicotine alcohol protein yep right so how do you mog them say hey i just got back from pyongyang i got some crystal meth that's purer than a graph diamond let's hit this now they're scared because they're like i don't want to touch that that's too crazy and so now you're the boss you're the boss and you don't even have to do any hard drugs yep and so that you've

established your dominance just throw it on the table exactly and watch them scatter to the wind Yeah, their fear is your win. Yeah leave with your reputation intact So the last thing or actually step 5 Spycraft everyone suspects at these parties that the Asian women are CCP spies But that's racist and just wrong. What you need to watch out for are the Canadian guys because they blend in. You think that they're Americans, but then you find out you get completely blindsided. This happened to me. Yeah. Gaffon's law.

I was shocked when I learned that. So you need to be figuring out who is un-American, who's from Canada. You can usually ID them by if they're saying happy holidays instead of Merry Christmas. Very un-American. And then you could drop an obscure ice hockey reference. You could start talking about the Zamboni market and how Zambonis are technically hard tech. And if they get excited, that's a tell. It's Canadian. He's into hockey.

And if someone questions you, you're already good because you can show off your tattoo of the eagle eating the panda bear. And they know you're on America's team. And so the last step, step six, you got to party like a legend. You got to be a contrarian. You got to leave your mark. You got to get ready for the pool. We always recommend wearing a swimsuit under your tuxedo. You go into the bathroom.

You hang up your tuxedo. Nice and neat. You want to leave it nicely folded. It wants to look good when you get back in it. Exactly. Hop in the pool. Maybe you start a revolution. VCs are herd animals. They'll all jump in. All of a sudden it's a pool party. And do your best. If, if, if any of your absolute boys are in there, do your best to start a whirlpool, you know, where you all move around long enough, uh, that you kind of

create this, like basically creating a movement founder, uh, venture capitalists like to invest in founders that can create a movement. And venture capitalists like to invest in founders that can create a movement yep and so this is a wonderful physical display uh not just physicality but ability to you know create something bigger than yourself right a whirlpool is a great example of that and a beaner or any type of emerging gp is going to just appreciate their pool getting used in general yeah many of those pools go untouched for months. I completely agree. And so it's a sign of respect to say, Hey, you pay to get this pool cleaned every single week and serviced. I'm going to use it, uh, so that you get your money's worth.

Yeah. Let's use the fruits of your labor. A cannonball is respectful. Yep. Uh, so you got any more tips for me? I mean, you really, you really covered it almost all. Yeah. My, my main stuff kind of just echoes a lot of what, a lot of what you're saying. I think it's always about finding a way to stand out. You, you sort of went over a number of different ways to do that and be memorable. Right. But the biggest thing, if I could hone in on anything, it's become the main character. Yep. If somebody's hosting people at their house, they're trying to create an environment that says, Oh, you know, look, look at how incredible my network is, the quality of the people that I surround myself with, the quality of my portfolio. And so if you're going to become the main character, you need to be controversial.

The best founders are often controversial, right? Steve Jobs, Travis Kalanick, Kalanick, you need to figure out a way to pattern match this and do that in this sort of party environment. So that can be, you already covered this. A lot of people are going to be sticking to one to two drinks. Try drinking order of magnitude more than that. Power law outcome for drinking. Power law drinking, they call it. And this is really like you want them to remember you on Monday, right? So the Saturday party, everybody's in a daze on Sunday. And then Monday you send that email out.

Hey, it was great seeing you at the party. I don't remember much, but I'd love to get together and sort of talk further, take the conversation a little bit further. This is one of those like telian secrets about Silicon Valley. Like we know some VCs who get completely blacked out and they've gone on to raise huge funds. Yeah, there's sort of a blackout to fund manager pipeline that's pretty well established.

And so, yeah, kind of narrative violation there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you know, you know. Another one, insist on bringing your own security. Oftentimes there's going to be security already there. And if you're going to a party with, with people like this, you want them to know that you have enemies and that you need your own security with you. If I meet a founder and they don't have any enemies, they're probably not doing anything

important. And I probably don't want to invest in them. So by bringing your own security, it adds to this sort of mystique and alert and saying like, why does he need four bodyguards surrounding him at all times? I thought he was just domesticating bears. He must be doing something much bigger. Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, seed stage founder, like how does he have this many enemies? How is, how is this, you know, a high threat environment? Um, so it's just a way to establish sort of your importance. Um, second, so this happens a lot. Uh, sometimes you're getting invited to a VC holiday party for a VC that you love. That's one situation.

That's kind of what we outlined. But if you get invited to a rival VC's holiday party, you can bring, I'd recommend bringing a journalist as a plus one. And here's the trick. Disguise them as an escort so that you don't make anyone's alarm bells go off. Oh my God. escort so that so that you don't make anyone's alarm bells so basically if they're just yeah that makes sense yeah yeah if they're disguised as an escort that's pretty common for people to bring escorts to a holiday party like this and so nobody the rival vc won't know what hit them until they're in the information on Monday.

There you go. Yeah. And I mean, the journalists will be able to blend in because they all come from fabulous wealth. Totally. It won't be a problem. They're going to know what wines to select and which appetizers to skip and whatnot. And then the last thing, a little more serious, bring extra large napkins. A lot of rounds get done on the back of napkins at these kind of parties.

Makes sense, yeah. But depending on your situation as a founder, there might be a lot of structure added to the deal. And so if you have a bigger napkin, you'll kind of need the extra space to kind of work out all the kinks and make sure you get the whole thing and the signature blocks and everything like that so bring extra napkins bring a journalist as a plus one if you're going to your enemy's holiday party and whatever the situation is bring your own security we should make paper napkins that have full excel sheets printed on them yes so you can just do a full model yeah yeah yeah you can do this deal on the back of a napkin it's simple and it's just the most complicated dcf you've ever seen that's great well that's fantastic let us know how it goes folks

use those tips and enjoy christmas parties at vc events this holiday season uh moving on let's do some dms that we got we have a bunch here uh first is from jeremy good friend of the show he says why won't you guys put on a tie that's a good question i think uh for 2025 that should be a new year's resolution i'm putting on a tie uh send me your recommendations send me we we found a great net jets tie it was a steal uh we're gonna find we're gonna become tie experts tie experts yeah guys in la guys in la put on a a suit and think they deserve an award. Yes. And they haven't even thought about getting to the tie yet.

So there's levels to it. He did send us this the day that I was wearing a tuxedo with a bow tie though. So, you know, pay attention. I do wear ties every once in a while. Oh, here's a more serious DM that I got. Ahoy, John. Do you know how I can get off the employment blacklist? I've applied to an amount of jobs that would blow your mind this year and I've only had 10 or so interviews.

What do you think about how to stand out? Maybe we can tell some jokes but also give some serious advice because I know that this person is seriously applying to jobs and is seriously trying to get a job right now. And is kind of willing to do anything. Very, very strong hustler. Sent me some just like very interesting stock tips. He found this company that is in the caviar business that was mooning for a while. And he's just like observing. He's not like a trader, but he just like knows an interesting storyline, clearly tapped in, but is really having trouble standing out in the kind of vanilla hiring, send in your resume. He just doesn't make it through the first gate.

So what would you recommend to stand out? Maybe jokingly, maybe seriously. I know he's looking for real advice though. Applying for jobs is pretty much futile unless unless you're applying to these sort of big companies that have sort of established pipeline yeah even even then i don't really recommend it you want to the one application process that works is like you're a new grad at a top school and there's a recruiting cycle yeah it's like yeah of course you put in your application with bain bcg mckinsey and there's a recruiting cycle. And it's like, yeah, of course you put in your application with Bain, BCG, McKinsey,

and it's like a clear flow. And even relatively unknown seed stage startups will get 3,000 applicants for a entry level role. Any tech venture. And so it's completely impossible to try to get jobs that way. Not impossible, but I think people going and applying to a bunch get jobs that way. Not impossible. Uh, but, but I don't, I think people going and applying to a bunch of jobs, feeling like they're being productive and working towards, um, something is not a good idea too. So two things, one establishing some type of personal

relationship with someone at the company that could be the founder that could be an investor in the company that could be, uh, you be, you need some type of warm relationship. Otherwise, you're just going to get lost in the stack. Second, this is especially probably relevant to engineering roles. If you can go talk to, go find 50 engineering-focused recruiters and get on the phone with them because they're trying to get on the phone with potential candidates all day. Yep. And have them start to understand you and help and then start warm and sharing you to companies.

That's another way. But yeah, I think you just need to get more creative in order to get attention. My favorite story of hiring somebody was somebody who had seen some marketing in my last company, sent me a number of DMs that I actually didn't see. They went to the spam or requested messages folder. And then he just made an app for us,

like an entire end-to-end app that was fully out-of-the-box marketing drop. And that finally got through to me. And I jumped on, I think it was a Saturday that I saw it, and I was like, this is insane. Totally blew me away. And I had a conversation with him and ended up hiring him. Um, pretty much like after seeing that work, I was like ready to hire him on the first call. Um, so like you got to, if you're struggling to find a role, like you just got to get it, find a way to get like, figure out how to be 10 times more creative than what you're doing

right now. Sending a link, a boilerplate LinkedIn message, you know, probably not going to do it, but figure out a way to stand out. So two things, one on cold email, incredibly effective, but dialing in the complexity and length of a cold email is really tough and really critical to short. Hey, I just want a job. Can we hop on the phone? That's not going to break through. But also going super long and telling your entire life story is also going to feel like work. It needs to be just this perfect balance, like three to five sentences with phone number. Hey, you can just text me. Let's move to the next stage. You want to see these things as like a funnel. You want to get to like phone text meet like yeah very quickly and then in terms of the building something creating value before you

get paid essentially a lot of people are like oh well like you just want free work or whatever but i think that if you reframe in your mind in terms of like i could spend 40 hours applying to 400 jobs with generic applications and just like slightly reworded, you know, like cover letters saying, I like your industry, whatever, versus you take that 40 hours and you put that towards whatever your craft is, whether that's marketing or sales or development, you put that towards one company, it's more wood behind fewer arrows. That's going to break through. And I think that you'll actually see a higher conversion rate down the funnel, even though the top of funnel is so much smaller because you're actually just, just, you know, dedicated. I think that'll really show off. Yeah. Try to do some type of small

project. Even like if you're an engineer, message a CEO and say, Hey, I contributed to this like open source project that I know you guys use. That'll get you through. If you're at a marketing role, hey, here's five influencers in your category that I think could be potential partners and here's why. That'll get you through. Sales, same thing. Hey, here's three companies that I know that could be potential customers. I'd love to connect you to them and separately would be great to jump on the phone sometime. So we got a, we got reply guy of the month and the big, the big news here, reply guy of the month.

There's been so much, so much activity in the comment section of the TV account that we are moving reply guy of the month to reply guy of the week. And so there will be 52 up to 52 reply guys over the next year, uh, honorary reply guys. And I got to say this, there's, there's a number of accounts that have been putting in the work. We're talking 10, 20 plus comments a day. Uh, it's extremely excessive. The people that are, um, and necessary, the people that are, are standing out are, uh, are actually, you know, reply guys that are engaging with each other. So they're, they're

taking the conversation onto each other's accounts and each other's posts. They're engaging with, you know, companies like ramp and Devin. Uh, they're engaging with the employees of the companies of the companies that we feature. So there's levels to the reply game. Last week, we gave it to Baldo. He has even leveled up since then. His posting has been out of control good. And he actually had a little bit of back and forth with this week's reply guy of the week, which is none other than Turner Novak.

Congratulations to Turner. Congratulations, Turner. This guy, Turner Novak. Congratulations to Turner. Congratulations, Turner. This guy, Turner, I would have to imagine, has post notifications on. He has been highly, highly active. And this goes to show that it's not just emerging posters that can win this award. It doesn't, you know, Turner's got, you know,

100,000 plus followers on this platform. He's been very active for years. Elon Musk is a reply guy. Elon Musk is a reply guy too. He's been and been very active for years. And Elon Musk is a reply guy. Elon Musk is a reply guy with just emojis. This is so good. So tweets he engages. You're never above replying and being a reply guy. Yes. And Turner had some fantastic replies. I'll kind of go down them. Let's go through the greatest, greatest hits. Wow. Devin is a game changer engaging with Cognition Labs. We love to see that. We were talking about how expensive podcasting is. You've got mics, cables, cameras, $300,000 to spend on a branding agency just to get in the game. And Turner said each trust fund

actually comes with a podcast. So that would explain why there's so many podcasts. That makes sense. He also was trying to get wire instructions for Baldo seed round, which again, showing that engagement with other reply guys. Yeah. Kind of syndicated reply guys. And he actually said, you guys are doing it all wrong. You don't actually need a podcast. You just need to be able to tell people you have a podcast. Oh, interesting. Telling someone you have a podcast gets you all the same benefits without having to deal with any of the downsides. So this is it. You just have a podcast. You can say, Hey, do you want to come be a guest on my

podcast? And, uh, if they say yes, maybe you do a podcast with them just to show like, you know, extend an olive branch. Uh, having somebody on your podcast is the modern equivalent of an ology branch. Uh, he also was dunking on tech crunch a little bit. He says tech crunch has been real quiet since the Technology Brothers got together. So anyways, love to see this. He even took it a step further. This kind of was the icing on the cake. He did not release an episode of his podcast

during Thanksgiving, but he used that as an opportunity to promote Technology Brothers podcast. So setting a new bar, I see a pretty vicious rivalry emerging between Baldo and Turner, uh, bright future for both of them as posters. Uh, but, uh, certainly, um, going to be continuing to get at it in the comment section. So, um, congratulations to Turner. We will be getting you your metal in the mail soon. So thank you for replying and never stop near cyan says i am purchasing mark zuckerberg's golden chain for 15 420 dollars and 69 cents

and it's one of zuck's gold chains in support of the edge institute and uh this this was all over the timeline people were very excited about the auctioning of Mark Zuckerberg's Golden Chain, which is very cool. I guess this was donated, but you know the whole backstory. Can you break it down and then tell us why we are awarding the Brother of the Week, not to Zuck, but to someone else? Yes. So anyway, so this auction was hosted

by a friend of the podcast and friend of ours, Justin Mayers. So Justin has his own company, TrueMed. And totally fire. Made his money in bone broth, but more recently has been running TrueMed. He's also a venture partner at Long Journey Ventures, famous venture capital firm. And Justin has created this thing called Inflection Grants,

which is a program where if you're 25 and under and $2,000 would change your life, you can get a grant. So this could be getting a plane ticket somewhere. Let's say you're living in Tennessee and you want to get to Silicon Valley. They'll give you a grant that lets you fly out, meet somebody and potentially change the trajectory of your life. It could be a computer. Let's say a kid's in high school and they're good at video editing and they want to get better at that. They'll give them a grant to buy a computer. And so this entire auction are tailor-made suits eligible. Yes. So, so if you're, uh, if you're a Gen Z founder, you're going to Y Combinator, you want to stand out and you want

to get a tailored suit, uh, from Fiorentino label, uh, $2,000,,000 is not going to get you that, but you could go down to suit supply and pick up a suit from there. And so, yeah, it's an amazing program, sort of adjacent to Teal Fellowship, more accessible, and just goes to show that it doesn't take that much money to change the trajectory of someone's life, right? It's cool. So very cool program. And so this chain, they were able to secure Mark Zuckerberg's former daily driver chain. Fantastic.

And auction it off and able to raise $100,000 for inflection grants. And so that's 50 people that are going to get this grant. And so if you're interested in the program, go to inflectiongrants.com I believe is the thing and congratulations to Justin

one of the founding brothers of the week and nobody deserves it more than him this week so thank you let's continue with potentially a future brother of the week Luke Metro he's been on the show before he says it's kind of cool how raising

a seven-figure seed round is generally easier than getting a job as a VC associate. Interesting. Yeah, this was somewhat controversial in the group chats. Yeah, Pio was saying that this behavior needs to be shamed, and I think he was talking about the pattern of VC associates or something? No, no and I think he was talking about the pattern of

VC associates or something? What was he saying? No, no, I think he was saying it shouldn't be that easy to raise millions of dollars for your company. Got it. And I can see it both ways. Fiio's point of view is a lot of people, their first few ideas that they work on are just not going to be that great, right? And sort of resources that are potentially wasted. Uh, I can see that side. Uh, the other side of this is that the VC associate job is just not at most firms is not that you're kind of like a BDR SDR, like cold reaching out to companies, the good companies don't want to talk to the associates. And so it's just sort of like a role that has a bunch of busy work and maybe it's, you know, maybe it ends up being a pathway to joining the firm as partner or joining another firm as partner. But I think in a lot of funds, the associate role is almost like a death

trap. But I think it's generally good that more young people will be better qualified to be investors later in life if they like build stuff. i think it's generally good that uh it's it's it and you know luke is just like identifying this but it's pretty wild how it's some for some people it's easier for them to get it to raise a seed round than get a job which is which is actually probably very a a indicator of how strong our innovation economy is. Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, just like almost like a tax on large VC funds, if you raise a billion dollar fund and you put a hundred million aside for million dollar seed rounds, that's a hundred companies. Yeah. You're not going to hire a hundred associates with a billion dollar fund.

Yeah. And so the math just plays out much better. You get all these call options and then all these companies. Yeah. It really does seem like it's a better job. That would be an interesting fund strategy though. It's a hundred million dollar fund with a hundred associates and they just fight. They just fight for the death. There's a leaderboard every single week. Who's talking to the most companies. He's doing the most deals. There are some funds that track calls in in the crm like you got to be making 40 emails i'm sure yeah 40 calls a week it's crazy yeah oh well i i i agree with luke on

this i think i think it is it is wild but i think it's the correct correct model um erroneous input uh created a fantastic meme of us i love this this is reply guy of the month or week uh level posting he's a candidate for sure. Yeah. Do not stop erroneous input. We love what you're doing on the map. It's a beautiful photo. Found some great photos of us from the show. Photoshop them in to this, uh, this sports car in the snow and, uh, really, really good job with the cropping and the masking. Just this, it's not a hack job. This is, this is class. I like it. Um, really, really good job with the cropping and the masking just this very intentional hack job this is this is class i like it um really really good probably could have blended in the tb logo into

the hood a little bit more dusted a little snow over the hood in a couple months we'll be pulling out the 3d rendering software really baking it in using sora yeah yeah maybe but we we love to see the user user generated content where it's going, how it's growing. And we appreciate what you do for the show. Great work. We wouldn't be who we are without you. Uh, let's go through this three post deep dive by our for rock funny name. Uh, and I think, did you want, did you want to start with, uh, the Steph post Steph movie? She says She says, a GP from a multistage VC firm is anonymously posting private revenue numbers and funding rounds of large companies that are apparently quite accurate, and they only have 450 followers, and most of their tweets have almost no likes. And

Arfor Rock is posting 11 labs, 90 million ARR, planning 100 million EOI, profitable, closed unannounced round at 3.2 billion from iconic growth in A16Z. And Arfarok also says, $20 million ARR in the first two months, fastest growing software company ever, raising 80 to 100 million at 1 billion. Have a few term sheets first week in market. And then Arfarok closes with saying, my DMs are open if you have some tea. It ain't much, but it's honest work. So, yeah, what's going on here? So you remember last bubble, 2021, there was an account. I think it was called Genuine Info or something like that.

That was just a similar approach that was basically leaking major deal making that was happening, you know, months or two months out before it was getting publicly announced. And so Arthur Rock, great name. Uh, I actually don't know what it's in a reference to Arthur Rock, Arthur Rock, the original GP or the original, uh, like VC. Wow. Wow. I just proved I'm a zoomer. Yeah. Um, the original GP himself. So, um, anyways, the first venture capitalist, the first venture capitalist. So great, great name and some, some interesting Intel. I actually DM with him a little bit last night. Nice guy, a technology brother himself, clearly. But yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, it's an interesting strategy, Cotton, because I think at some point some schizo is going to just try to pinpoint all of this and put it all together.

Because on one hand, I think it's a lot of this information by the time that, but he's not sharing anything that would be potentially damaging to companies. But he's certainly front running the news cycle, which our friends at the Misinformation like to do quite a lot. And so anyways, I'm interested. I think I'm long this account. I'm investing sub 500 followers. He's got a bright future and it's one to follow. It's funny because I think it will whip GPs into this hysteria because they're going to see sometimes announcements get done

and GPs are like punching the air because they just didn't see the company at all. And it just like happened. And they're like, how did this happen without us seeing it? And now it's even earlier than that. Like the term sheets are basically already signed and they're seeing our for rock and they're just like sending our for rocks posts to their principal being like, how the fuck did you miss this? I love how you say during during the last bubble because it's just like you're always in a bubble we're always in one either in a crash or a bubble yeah there's

no normal time yeah and this is true like when i got to silicon valley in 20 2012 2013 everyone's talking about texan the major bubble and then that bubble went on for a decade that was a great bubble it's a great bubble but i think we're in the best one yet. The America bubble. Yeah. Uh, Jacob Sandsbury says having kids in the next five years might be a tragic mistake. Every smart bio founder slash scientist I've talked to seems to think that embryo editing for things like shorts, shorter, short sleeper, reduced cancer risk, et cetera, as possible on a near term horizon. Imagine having two kids a couple of years apart. One is a superhuman and the other isn't sorry jim little timmy won't get cancer only needs four hours of sleep and you're normal uh and you're normal you were just born in the wrong order 3k likes interesting the the problem with this is

that like these innovations like it's not it's not going to be some binary step change it's going to be very smooth and so like yes every every key cell healthier d cell alert d cell alert no i'm kidding i i i looked at this i'm more like part of being human is being imperfect yep and uh i i plan to have you know many more children with my wife and uh go watch gattaca and uh the indomitable will of the human spirit yeah and and uh my children are perfect to me even though i'm sure like one of them needs more sleep than the other when you know all these things so i think a lot of these editing technologies will be possible once you're alive there'll be medications there'll be all sorts of different

yeah it's also do you want to be in the first generation of fully gene edited children where you're like oh i want to make sure i want to allow them to only sleep three hours so they can grind harder. There's probably no side effects. And then it creates this like insane side effect. And it's like, yeah, maybe you want to cycle a 20 year cycle. All of them became serial killers. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I just want to edit for not being one shotted by ayahuasca. Yes. Yeah. In the downside that my children yeah also if you talk to a parent and you said hey there's this new experimental uh gene editing technology that will let your kids sleep for four hours i don't know a single parent would take that

every parent would be like every day where's the 12 hour sleep yeah every night you're basically optimizing for how to make sure this light is longer sleep. Blackout curtains, noise machine. Let's do two noise machines. Clearly doesn't have kids. Have you done the overlapping noise machines? No, I haven't done it. It works. There's levels to the noise machine.

I love it. Okay. Cora says, today was the day I finally broke. I was accidentally not disassociated enough on the streets of San Francisco and projectile vomited from the yucky sights. This is interesting because I looked at Cora's profile and she's like a very normal tech person. She's not some like raging right wing lunatic

who's like agitating for culture war. But 10 years ago, there was this guy, Greg Gottman, who posted something very similar talking about the homeless problem in uh in san francisco and he was canceled harder than like anyone ever like could not get a job for years for years and then he kind of bounced around i think he's doing okay now but it was really really rough he wrote a post about how like san francisco has a lot of homeless problem and like we need to do something about this and everyone Was canceled for that

Incredibly canceled like wow terrible. He got hired at Twitter for a little bit got there was an error You're basically I pray I'm I basically miss this era. I was in basically in high school But um, you said Dustin Curtis got canceled. You're liking nice things. Yeah, this guy got canceled for identifying the homeless problem Yeah, it was it was rough and yeah the tech industry hadn't learned to like circle the wagons at all and so there was just it was complete scapegoating and then just ostracization and you just became an apostate very quickly for for doing anything like this yeah it was crazy and yeah greg was a little too early on that one but it's interesting to see just from what I can tell,

just a completely normal person in tech. Not raging like, oh, some culture war, like clickbait, trying to rile people up. Yeah, it's not a contrarian thing. I mean, some of my core memories of San Francisco,

unfortunately, are being a kid and walking around and being stunned at some sort of very traumatizing situation. I mean, I lived in the Tenderloin in 2012, 2013. And it was rough. But I mean, I'm a tall guy.

Most times people would just be like, oh, do you play basketball? They get kind of distracted. And once you're like a local, people just kind of clock you as a local. And you'd carry a basketball, right? Exactly. Or you'd leave a basketball, right? Exactly. Or you'd leave the house. Place for the Warriors. It wasn't that bad for me.

But I went back after COVID and I'd seen everyone on Twitter in San Francisco talk about how bad it was. And I was like, okay, I'm going to try and be objective here. Like how can I quantifiably say if it's actually worse or if that's just some psyop from tech people? And the thing that I landed on as being like something that I noticed that was physically different was the number of barbecues that were on the street. Like more permanent encampments. Because you're actually like living and cooking and like sometimes even hooking up gas lines and stuff. Like it's like very, very permanent installations. And I was like, I don't remember that happening.

And so you can never really tell if it's like, oh, you see a street and there's a lot of homeless people. It could just be like, well, they moved from five streets to one street. So there's not actually a gain in the number of homeless people. But the barbecue thing really, really stuck out to me. So I do think there's an issue and I really hope they solve it soon.

And apparently the best way to solve it is to have Cesar and Pink come and visit. You saw that? Gary Tan. Yeah, Gary Tan's leading the serious charge. But anytime there's Dreamforce, Mark Benioff is just like, clean up this entire city. It's great.

Let's go to Will Quist. He says, that sound you hear is tech investment bankers everywhere canceling their holiday plans and breathing a sign of relief. And it says this post is unavailable. Should we even cover this? No, that was something about Service Titan. about service titan oh um because it was service titan they they priced it like 70 and then it went out at like 101 and for a long time the tech ipos would dip right after it was rough and the spacks were like aggressively bad and so so many vcs were like let's just stay private

longer yeah but now the game's back on. M&A is back on the menu. Lena Kahn's out. IPOs are back on the menu. Start underwriting your seed investments to DecaCorn outcomes. It's okay to invest at 50 posts, pre-revenue, pre-idea, pre-team. Just do it.

50 posts. 50 million going into the seed round. 250. We're building Yeah, yeah, yeah. 250 on 250, right? Yeah, exactly. Sorry, sorry. We're building the AI here, man. We need some cloud credits.

Oh, this is a good one, but we're a little bit too deep in the post. Gary Tan says, I want this. I would fund this too. And it's Andre Karpathy talking about building a tool to help you read along with a book. We talked about this last time, but Krish then says,

I love you, Gary, but you guys literally rejected me. And he posts his company. But the beauty of YC, you can apply again. Gary wants it. You can apply again. DM him.

And if you want an AI reading companion, go to getmeaning.xyz. getmeaning.xyz slash home. Do you really need the slash home, bro? Yeah, and go getmeaning.com. And I mean, what a real poster. He included a link, 2.5K likes. Real posters built different.

Yeah. Respect. Built different, broke through. Respect. Yeah, so never too late to apply to YC. You can always get in. GitGo Bioworks went through at like 200 million valuation, promoted post. Not a promoted post. I'm just going to jump in because this one is near and dear to my heart.

I got a post from Dhruva Rahendra, a close friend of mine. Yesterday, Dhruva and myself and the deterrence team announced D deterrence, which is a new company leveraging robotics to manufacture energetics. So for anybody that's not heavy, heavy in defense, a lot of the high profile defense tech companies like Anduril have been going after these sort of very sexy programs like drones and autonomous submarines. And there hasn't been a player yet that's come out and made a made an effort to rebuild the sort of high volume manufacturing base. So for anything like, you know, munitions in the case of deterrence, deterrence is first product is manufacturing primer, which is the explosive sort of like thing that, that starts the reaction in a, in a, in a round, in a bullet. And so, yeah, deterrence has been in the works for,

let's see, some, you know, Druva and Brian, the, the founders had been working on this since last year at this point, but the company got out and running earlier this year, built a fantastic team. And yeah, this is a company that I was fortunate enough to be involved with since probably six months prior to incorporation. So personally got a front row seat and the team now is stacked. Tesla, Palantir, Rivian, a bunch of, you know, incredible engineers and operators and ridiculous customer backlog. Like we were able to identify something that that has a shocking amount of demand. And so if you're looking for a job, check us out, deterrence.com. I got a number of positions open. And this was a fun round for me because my good friend, Will Cofield, who's here in L.A., led the round, $10 million in total financing. And a bunch of friends of the podcast participated as well, Heston, Berkman, Jack Dreyfuss, people like that. So very exciting.

And it was good to finally get this out. It's always a strange thing when you've been working on something in silence for oftentimes more than a year. And so to finally get out there and see the reaction is great. So good work to the deterrence team. And yeah, this is one to follow. Fantastic. Let's go to avi shiftman he says there's nothing more nauseating than a than a tesla uber and you had some comments on this what's wrong with tesla ubers break it down so uh so being in malibu like uber is super

unreliable so i always have to like i have a driver that will take me to the airport. And I had to tell him like, stop picking me up in your Tesla because yes, it's like, you know, maybe environmentally friendly and it's just convenient, modern features or whatever. But it's just so nauseating sitting in the back. And a lot of people don't have been slow to sort of realize why this is. The obvious one is the acceleration. Tesla's have like the acceleration of like a turbo S, the obvious one is the acceleration teslas have like the acceleration of like a turbo s but like even like throughout like the full like it's just like way too much acceleration for the average person uh it's like driving an f1 car on the street um

the regenerative braking so the the car automatically braking creates this to to sort of recharge the battery creates this effect where it's this fast acceleration and then you take your foot off the gas and it breaks aggressively more so than if you just let it coast. And then the big one that I should put on my... Tinfoil hat. Put on my tinfoil hat on to maybe protect me from some EMFs.

But Tesla's just emit a ridiculous amount of EMF, which is low know sort of low level radiation a lot of people say that it doesn't uh have any negative effects uh but there's quite a lot of evidence that it might and uh you can actually go on youtube and just search like tesla emf reading and in most teslas the emf levels are much higher in the back seat so when you're sitting in the back seat you're getting like matt you're basically getting microwaved and then the car is like you know accelerating decelerating it's not a very um yeah not a very amazing experience so and it's probably something people don't notice if they're in the front seat because their look eyes on the roads acceleration is it's like you you rarely get car sick when you're driving yeah exactly so if you're

driving and you're the one exactly so if you're driving and you're the one on the gas and and then also a lot of the uber drivers are just trying to get there as fast as possible so they're going to be really pushing the acceleration and braking to get there faster because they want to do the next ride whereas if you're driving yourself you might be a little bit more legally but i want to see i know that there's stuff tesla can do to mitigate emf some other car manufacturers have made efforts on this. So I'd like to see them prioritize it because I don't have anything against Tesla as a manufacturer. I think it's great. Let's go to dudes posting their W's. He says, buddy is the most condescending word in dude culture. And there's a meme that shows a hierarchy. Guys that say big dog are at

the top. Guys that say bro and man are after that and then sir bruh chief dude son and fella and buddy are at the bottom so bud and buddy are just so much farther than chief i don't i don't think chief is derogatory but yeah well it's about the it's about the hierarchy like are you like when you say big dog, that's like a sign of respect, sir, chief. These are boss. These are these are your paying respects upward. Then there's brother, which is equivalent man, equivalent dude, sir, even. But then when you go son, that's younger. And buddy is like what you call your dog.

And so it's like, are you talking down to people or are you talking up to them or showing a sign of respect sun can also be used in the right context can be um you know positive damn son like that no more like here come on son i'll teach that's still very negative yeah but it can be but it's more familial like yeah it's got a more positive i guess connotation but that's why technology brothers we're all equal here yeah we're all equal i do think that if a vc calls their portfolio founder bud they should be diluted to zero like there should be like some type of new round with structure done to just dilute them to zero because it's so condescending and uh should should be taken out of the vocabulary entirely that's great well this is interesting word grammar says most of Peter Thiel and Paul Graham's advice is directly contradict each other. You have to pick a side.

Trying to follow both is a good way to make sure you end up following neither. Word grammar. I'd never seen him until this post, him or her. Um, but at great post and perfectly controversial, which is why the engagement seems strong yeah i mean i think that the i mean the funds are set up wildly differently what yeah i was gonna say you're perfectly qualified for this i've been through yc twice work with peter work at founders fund uh yeah so i mean the funds are set up wildly differently like, YC invests in thousands of companies. Founders fund is extremely picky and they're trying to teach you two different things. I think YC is effectively just, can you start a business? And by the end of YC, you like most of those founders,

unless they mess something up, they will have a company like a business. I talked to a YC founder that went through, they tried to build some like SAS product and then they wound up it didn't they didn't really have traction they wound up just being a software consultancy yeah and so the guy makes a great living as a software consultancy and it's just like a lifestyle business essentially it's great whereas the founders fund teal model is very very narrowly selected for monopoly power power their modes or power law outcomes can this be a trillion dollar company yeah it's not it's not

under right it's not underwriting oh we think this can be they can ipo and have a 10 billion dollar market cap it's are we going to still want to invest in this company at a 200 billion dollar valuation exactly exactly so that's just a wildly different question and you would never get that in a yc interview like oh like let's make sure that you can that it's plausible that this could be a trillion dollar company no it's like are you an interesting hacker are you building something do you want to build yeah and the cool thing is that yc generates a number of power law companies right coinbase uh lucy uh yeah uh airbnb right so they they still generate these these tealian companies yes and and uh founders fund will back those companies yeah but it's just a much different method let's just continue with word grammar because this one's great uh god cursed

peter teal by making him silicon valley's biggest tech guru. Now, the minute he says something, millions of tech bros listen and agree with him because of his curse. He will never be able to be a contrarian ever again. So this is interesting and this is somewhat true, but, um, there are plenty of things that he doesn't say publicly. Yeah. It's a timing mismatch. Yeah, exactly. He's going to say he's going to make everyone believe what he wants them to believe when it is convenient yeah it's timing mismatch more just in the sense of like like there's clearly ideas that he's talking about with his inner circle then workshopping in private events then there's then there's private dinners where these ideas go out and then maybe like six months to a year later it's on a podcast yeah and so yeah it's a very intentional he i would say he's understanding

the weight of his words yeah and being very intentional with how he rolls out that messaging yep to not come out and be too dogmatic about one thing yeah yeah yeah too early i mean yeah we heard a we heard a talk by him recently in miami and um it was very clear that that was something that was still being workshopped and we've talked about this offline, but it's still contrarian to actually follow zero to one's approach to a T where most investors will say, oh, we're contrarian. We're only investing in power law, monopoly companies, but then they'll do like a run of the mill, like B2B SaaS company still. Right. And so they're not actually like fully embodying that approach. Yeah. And I, I, my, my, my takeaway from zero to one is always like, if you read the book and you really apply it to your business, like what you're meant to do, what you're enjoying building, um,

the answer might not be, don't start a company. It might just be don't raise venture capital. Yeah. And there, and YC is not that check, but there are plenty of companies that get through YC and then they don't need to raise because they're not building in that zero to one playbook sense. And that's okay. But it just, it wouldn't count in that metric. Let's go to Didi. Didi says, just learned that WhatsApp has not 10, not 20, but 150 designers all working tirelessly to make sure the app looks exactly the same as it did in 2014. 92 K likes. Yeah. So this is crazy because the X design team, which now includes my dear friend, Brandon Jacoby,

who you've covered on the show before the X design team, I think is under five people. Like it's some like tiny, tiny, much more complicated product, I would say, in many ways to run a social app than a messaging app, even though WhatsApp has plenty of social features. So anyways, this goes back to what we've talked about before, why haven't more companies done the Elon and just cut like 80% of people?

But I guess WhatsApp being part of meta now, maybe it doesn't have the same incentive. Yeah. I also wonder like a lot of those designers are working on like little new small like like like ad integrations because the core product does look the same but there's a lot of like design every simple product is deeply complex yeah all the different onboarding flows and like little screens that you don't see and you never really interact with. But yeah, 150 is a lot of designers for an app. That's pretty basic. It feels basic,

but yeah, I mean, Facebook has a long history of stuffing features in these apps. Like Instagram used to just be photos. Now there's like 25 different tabs. I do. Do you have to give them credit for keeping Instagram, Instagram?

Like they've like a hundred X, the features and it's still the core functionality of going there to see what's likely the most interesting posts for me at that moment in time, profile still fairly clean. So credit to them for that. Let's go to Lee Jacobs. He says, when Chase Lockmiller first told me about Crusoe, I said, wait, you are turning large fireballs

from the ground into Bitcoin in North Dakota? What started as that absurd idea is now the leading full-stack AI inference company, excited for the new fuel from our friends at Founders Fund. That is crazy. Do you know the story of Crusoe, like how they started?

I don't know the full, I only know that Lee was the first investor. Yeah, Lee was the first investor. Lee was the first investor. And so Crusoe, the whole play was like finding stranded energy and then using that for compute to power supercomputers. Very cool. And so what they did was they found natural gas plants

where they have to flare the gas. And so there's excess gas that comes off. They can't capture it. It's just going to burn. And that's bad for emissions. So instead, they burn it and they turn it into energy that then they can use to power the computers. And at the time, the most valuable use for cheap energy was mining Bitcoin. So they started there and then obviously AI came up and the Bitcoin mining business has kind of taken a

backseat to the AI infrastructure now. That's very cool. So yeah, it's crazy, like second and third act for that company that was only possible because they took the path they did and for a long time people were kind of like oh you're like a bitcoin mining company like this isn't interesting during the downturn and now that the ai boom's here it's like we got it all the all the vcs that probably passed when they were you know doing something that was less on narrative. But we joked about this earlier, but you said the Crusoe founder said some of these foundation models would burn whale blubber

if they could. Yeah, totally. They're so desperate for energy. So desperate for energy. This goes back to just energy being one of the kind of core foundational layers of the AI value chain. Just today I saw Satya Nadella was doing some sort of interview.

Press conference for, no, press conference for Microsoft and he said that they're no longer GPU poor or like GPU bound. Yeah. And everyone's like,

oh, bear case for NVIDIA. Like they have all that they need. I don't think it's that. I think that they're buying the maximum and now they've hit a different bottleneck which is probably energy.

Yeah. Which is crazy. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from our friend Delian over at Varda. He says, they've hit a different bottleneck, which is probably energy. Yeah. Which is crazy. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from our friend Delian over at Varda. He says, if you want to come work for me, the teams I work with most at Varda is expanding. If you've worked in Gov and love policy,

come help us make Space Factory as a reality. It takes legislation as much as it takes nuts and bolts to make this crazy thing a reality. He puts a link in the next tweet. They have a fantastic role available, government affairs manager. They're going to be based in Washington, D.C. So if you have experience in working the government, and they go over some of the requirements here. But Varda has just been taking a crazy idea

and then just ruthlessly executing against it, getting contracts, proving out that this is very real and happening. So awesome opportunity for the right person. The only downside is if you take that job, Delian will probably refer to you as a swamp creature. I was out in D.C. once with him, and he was like, oh, yeah, I'll introduce you to our swamp creature, our head of government affairs.

Our head of swamp. Our head of swamp. He's so swampy. He's been in the swamp for years. He he's the best it's a term of endearment but it's very silly uh let's go to mark sisson he says uh when i heard the new york times was suing open ai for using its archives as training data i knew relying on llms as arbiters of truth was fucked beyond all recognition. So real. So real. I mean, yeah, I think you have to, models do a good job of processing broad. I don't know. You could argue maybe they don't do a good job, but they're aware of bias and trying to piece together what they imagine is the truth. But it's the same thing, same end thing that an individual is doing

of like looking at multiple sources and trying to piece together the truth. The truth is hard to nail down oftentimes in the world that we're in. But yeah, you certainly, this goes back to, there's a company out there called Dexa that I think is interesting. And they basically uh scrape all the binger podcasts and so you can ask what does mark huberman think about uh this you know gluten right and then and so this goes back to in the era of models yeah uh you're still going to go back to individuals so i'm going to trust the experts i'm going to trust the experts

joe rogan andrew huberman no but like like yeah obviously joking but like mark is a good example where i want to know what mark sisson thinks about oh totally about um seed oils right i don't want to know what what open ai thinks about it because they're probably going to say well popular science says that there's no issue with yeah and he's calling out new york times and there's been some crazy crazy quotes in the new york times recently about health like i really would trust huberman way more than new york times yeah uh didn't they say like ultra processed foods aren't bad for you it's like yeah so i can just eat oreos all day long like this is nutrition 101 you shouldn't be eating cheetos all the time this is not like some contrarian crazy idea. This is like pretty basic.

Anyway, we have some breaking news, folks. Lucy Guo has broken her silence. She has not posted in hours, but she just dropped a banger pod with Molly O'Shea. The queen of LA is talking about the creator economy. She's the founder of Passes. And we encourage you to go check out the podcast. And Lucy was also posting yesterday that, uh, she has millions of dollars in short-term capital gains and she's looking to marry somebody who has millions of dollars in

losses. That's ideally local to LA. And so you, and, and, and the two of you would be able to split the difference, the savings, uh, and then, and presumably get divorced soon afterwards. But anyways, if you have millions of dollars in short-term losses, go hit up Lucy. She's got a solution for you to make some of that back. Fantastic. Let's move on to Daniel Tenriro. I need to learn how to pronounce his last name. He says the Robin Hood Foundation is running a stock picking contest for donors and the leaderboard is truly a work of art. Put it in the Louvre. And the leaderboard is Bill Ackman at the top with a total return of over 100%. His long pick was Fannie Mae and his short sector was financials. Wait, so this is put on by Robin Hood? No, the Robin Hood Foundation with a space. And the funny thing here is that number two

is Mark Gallant and his long pick was Robin Hood the company. Wow. And his short pick was communications. And then MicroStrategy was the long pick

for Mark Gallant again. And David Einhorn picked Peloton. Wait, do you have back? I'm actually not familiar with the Robin Hood Foundation. I'm not familiar either. I think it's just a charity.

This is why you come to the Technology Brothers. Get the facts and the deep analysis and backstory. So if you know what the Robin Hood Foundation is, let us know in the YouTube comments. It's probably literally in the second post here in thread, but I didn't study for this one. We phoned it in, folks. This is an interesting one. Zach Coelius saysius says uh coleus is that how you pronounce it i don't know i wish i knew uh zach says played

credit card roulette for the for the dinner bill last night with a bunch of vcs and it was surprising how uncomfortable a bunch of them were what happened to the d-gen gambler mentality of our asset class for a neutral EV bet? It is such a no-brainer. Such a no-brainer. I love playing that game. Well, it's not always neutral EV. Because what if you're the one that drank the most wine, ordered the most steak, housed all the appetizers?

It could be extremely positive EV for you. So maybe the people that were sheepish, they just had a little salad on the side. And they're like, ah, I'm going to get burned here. I'm going to get burned. Yeah. Yeah. No, I just go into that. You want to be going to dinners

where you would happily pay for everybody and still feel like it was a good just exchange, right? Because you're going for the company. It's not about the food. It's not about how much you ate. It's not about how much you drank. It's about who you were there with and what deals you got done. It's great. Do we have any more promoted posts? I got a promoted

post from, uh, the number one, uh, business podcast in the world. Uh, David Senra with founders podcasts. He, uh, gave a great summary of the book, how to make a few billion dollars, which we've talked about before on the show. He Jacobs. He did a whole interview with Brad Jacobs. You called this out last time, but some of the most iconic founders now are actually living and breathing. And so David can just hang out with them and hear it straight from the horses,

from the thoroughbred's mouth. From the stallion's mouth. From the stallion's mouth. From the eventing horse's mouth. From the dressage horses uh if you haven't seen our gift guide go check it out we talk about the different horse horses that you should be gifting your friends um but a couple highlights out here narrow your focus to the most important dreams and tune out everything else two the most important thing a

ceo does is recruit superlative people. Three, an empty seat is less damaging than a poor fit. Four, resist the urge to flood communications with non-essential information. And five, if you want to make money in the business world, you need to get used to problems because that's what business is, solving problems. The problem we're solving on this podcast is tech one didn't have a podcast. And the tech adjacent podcast all in wasn't monetizing. So you couldn't get in front of that audience. This is how you're getting in front of a similar audience. So there's five more that I'm not going to say here, but go listen to Founders Podcast.

It is the number one business podcast. And thank you to David Senra for being on our board and supporting our show. The godfather of podcasting. Let's stay on podcasts and close with some news from Dextero. They say BuzzFeed has sold the show Hot Ones for $82.5 million. I mean, that would be a down round for us if we if we sold for 82 we wouldn't even clear the pref on that yeah i know that'd be rough but uh good for them i hope they i hope i hope they did okay that wasn't that wasn't that that feels i feel like it was originally reported that they were trying to sell it for like 30 or something like that oh really it seemed that that's coming

a lot higher because i think a lot of people just looked at that and they said the show was so reliant on the host yep that how do you really attach enterprise value unless you're locking them up for a pretty extreme time period so maybe they figured out a way to do that but it's funny because buzzfeed i think was wasn't weren't they trading at less than that or something they were trading i thought they were trading at like $20 million. Well, that's the equity value and so I think BuzzFeed has debt and so even if they sold this for 82,

they might still be under one on the equity. Yeah, they were using BuzzFeed or they were using the sale to reduce their... Pay down debt, yeah,

makes sense. Yeah, so they're trading at 126 now, but they were... Yeah, I do wonder about if there is asset value

beyond Sean Evans because his, I mean, he obviously is a great host, but his style is very much like ask the question and then kind of get out of the way. And there have been talk shows in the past that have had asset value beyond the core host. I think the best example is probably Late Night, which traded hands from Jay Leno to Conan O'Brien

in this very dramatic situation where then Conan got pulled and Leno came back you heard of this whole story it's like the late night wars um and so but that's that's very tied to there is there are only 24 hours in the day there there's going to be a late night show that's on Monday through Friday and there's only three spots for late night it's like 10 p.m 11 p.m midnight and then you get into the late late show that has no value and if you go earlier you're in prime time and you want to be showing like scripted stuff yeah and so there's only for a while it was like there were only four channels like nbc abc fox cbs or whatever yeah and so there were really only like

10 slots for late night shows that would do interviews for adults after the kids go to bed That type of stuff, but with the internet obviously there can be unlimited interview shows unlimited podcasts And so buzz like hot ones is obviously built like this incredible brand It was originally with complex then sold to BuzzFeed. It's traded hands a few times now Will be interesting to see where this goes I mean it doesn't seem like Sean Evans is stopping anytime soon. And it seems like they must've gotten him a great deal.

And I bet part of that 82 was built into his contract and predicated on a great contract there. So always interesting to see what's going on in the podcast world, but we got to wrap up. We got a lot to do. Got to get on with Taipei, I think. That's right. That's right.

So thanks for listening. Subscribe, follow us on X, and we'll see you next time. See you on the timeline. See you on the timeline.